The followups are pretty bad as well, sometimes. Like that mission to hit a comet with a rail gun. That was a brilliant success. Where's the movie?

That's always bugged me about NASA. They do the coolest stuff in the world and then can't be bothered to put the photos on the internet or string them together into a video. And trying to find anything on their website is like pulling teeth. They really need a better publicist, although they seem to have improved slightly with Curiosity. People complain that Americans are uninterested in space but NASA manages to suck all the adventure and excitement out of the amazing stuff they do.

To The Escape Zeppelin!:People complain that Americans are uninterested in space but NASA manages to suck all the adventure and excitement out of the amazing stuff they do.

Americans think excitement is a product that they pluck off a supermarket shelf or get streamed to them over the Internet. Then they wonder why their first-world problems make them so miserable.

This is what gets astrophysicists to go crazy with excitement:The picture itself looks boring. It's just a graph, like what you might see in an algebra class when first learning about functions and Cartesian coordinates. An anti-intellectual derptard would take one look at it, say "AAUGH MATH" and break into hives, then go back to fapping to clips of Kim Kardashian's silicone ass.If you understood the significance of the picture, though, it'd blow your mind away. There is no human physical achievement -- no football championship, no acting performance, no inspiring speech, no sniper shot -- that can approach even a pale mockery of the significance of that picture. A small robot, forgotten by the public, sent a bunch of bits that were translated into a graph that spoke more about the nature of the universe than the thousand best philosophers of the past thousand years combined -- and it's not even close. And the LAST thing you should do is take that statement on faith. If you studied science, if you studied the story behind this picture, if you understood the pure facts behind every pixel on that graph -- you would agree, freely.

Then there's this:At first glance anyone would go "meh". Hell, I'D go "meh". Even if you knew what was, you'd just go "meh". If you knew what it meant, though. . . how it was taken, and where, and why, it'd take fundamental assumptions about your very existence that you unquestioningly took for granted since childhood and shatter them like a hammer party in a house of mirrors.

NASA doesn't publish much in the way of flashy graphics because it's not a goddamn porn site. The most exciting stuff they do is visually very boring.

dragonchild:The picture itself looks boring. It's just a graph, like what you might see in an algebra class when first learning about functions and Cartesian coordinates. An anti-intellectual derptard would take one look at it, say "AAUGH MATH" and break into hives, then go back to fapping to clips of Kim Kardashian's silicone ass.If you understood the significance of the picture, though, it'd blow your mind away. There is no human physical achievement -- no football championship, no acting performance, no inspiring speech, no sniper shot -- that can approach even a pale mockery of the significance of that picture. A small robot, forgotten by the public, sent a bunch of bits that were translated into a graph that spoke more about the nature of the universe than the thousand best philosophers of the past thousand years combined -- and it's not even close. And the LAST thing you should do is take that statement on faith. If you studied science, if you studied the story behind this picture, if you understood the pure facts behind every pixel on that graph -- you would agree, freely.

And yet, you make no effort to explain the significance of the graph or point anyone in the right direction.

ipsofacto:And yet, you make no effort to explain the significance of the graph or point anyone in the right direction.

This is Fark. There is nothing I could say that couldn't get trolled out of existence.

I'm not saying "do your own homework" because I'm lazy. I gush about these pictures all the time. I could talk about them for hours. It actually takes some restraint to avoid posting a wall of text about how awesome those pictures are, and those are just two pictures out of millions. But finding out for yourself is the only way to do them justice.

dragonchild:ipsofacto: And yet, you make no effort to explain the significance of the graph or point anyone in the right direction.

This is Fark. There is nothing I could say that couldn't get trolled out of existence.

I'm not saying "do your own homework" because I'm lazy. I gush about these pictures all the time. I could talk about them for hours. It actually takes some restraint to avoid posting a wall of text about how awesome those pictures are, and those are just two pictures out of millions. But finding out for yourself is the only way to do them justice.

The problem is that they're not helping the public perception that science is boring. They do thrilling stuff but what they play up are the results that few people who aren't scientists understand. Learning the composition of comets is important but to the average American who has neither the time or money to learn college level chemistry it's less interesting than the probe that took the samples in the first place. My point is that NASA publicizes the things its scientists find exciting, not the things the average person finds exciting and as a result make science and space exploration boring when they most certainly not.

It's just like teaching a class, focus on what's interesting and use that to teach what's important. If you start with what's important but boring then you lose your audience.